If I had to nominate a piece of music to emulate Alan Yentob’s fMRI scan experience, I wonder if Andreas Scholl‘s performance of Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater would do the trick. I bought it at random in the Music Discount Centre CD shop near St Paul’s many years ago and could not stop listening to it — a complete accident, and something so arch I would have run a mile in the opposite direction if you’d suggested that I’d be forever captivated by the purity of this counter-tenor voice.

Well, to keep ploughing a furrow of recycling BBC programmes, here is a link (valid for about six days) to a show from Tuesday on Radio 3 where Scholl was interviewed (about 15 mins in), proving the virtue of my wall-to-wall listening to Radio 3 the past two months.

For students of corporate hubris (like me) it’s always interesting to hear experts in their particular field — let alone a virtuoso of the highest standing — explain how they tackle performance. When it is mastering the Erbarme Dich within the Bach St Matthew Passion, we should all sit up and pay attention:-

Scholl: Whenever you open your mouth and try to do justice to this piece, it is only possible with 100% heart, soul, body, technique. Everything needs to come together in that moment.

Sean Rafferty (Presenter): And a degree of humility, I think.

Scholl: Absolutely. The right perspective I would say. You should not walk out in a sense as if you composed the Matthew Passion or like the greatest moment will be me singing the Erbarme Dich. That’s vanity and that will destroy the piece. But also it will not help to walk out and thinking: ‘Mr Bach, I am not worthy of singing your music’. Because if you open your mouth you better are worthy to do that, better are good enough. So you either think you can do it then you give it everything. But if you have doubts that you can really bring justice to this piece then you should not sing it. It’s all or nothing with Bach, I would say.

So, it’s crucial to be neither too confident nor too humble. Well, Andreas Scholl may not be everyone’s bag, and I dare anyone to tell me the Pergolesi is better. I will stop now as I am at the very limit of my musical knowledge.

Twitter showed its worth when @ryansholin announced (at least, it was news to me in landlocked Bath) that Maverick’s – the annual big wave surfing event in Santa Cruz, Northern California — was convening this past weekend. The organisers called it last minute on Friday. All the young dudes rushed in to catch the notoriously huge Pacific west-by-north-west swell on Saturday.

Ryan, who blogs on the changing face of journalism, works for used to work for the Santa Cruz Sentinel, but recently moved to GateHouse Media, a large publisher of highly local print and online publications. Maverick’s is in his back yard. He pointed us to the Maverick’s website, where I spent enough time looking at 2006 wipeouts (see below) to end up with a headache. It didn’t take long.

Just in case you think I’m suffering from apostrophe failure, “Maverick’s” is short for “Maverick’s Point” — Maverick being a white-haired German Shepherd dog whose human surfing companion was reputedly one of the first to try the giant waves near Half Moon Bay back in the ’60s. The dog tried to swim out to join his surfing buddy, but the conditions were too treacherous and he had to be tied to the car bumper instead for his own safety.

Surfing heaven, sailing hell

I could not have cared less about surfing a few months ago. I’d seen crazy folks surfing mid-winter in Cornwall, desperately seeking even the tiniest waves in full wet-suits, while I stood (marginally less frozen and windswept) safely on shore. British surfing culture, such as I imagined it, left me cold; old surf-bum cliché mashed up with the with teenage surf fashion — who needed it?

It wasn’t that I didn’t have an affinity for the sea. I spent my twenties sailing a yacht most weekends and studying navigation on Tuesday evenings at night school in very non-coastal Parliament Hill, North London. I’m qualified as a Royal Yachting Association coastal skipper, hold the obligatory VHF radio operator’s licence, and can confirm that yachting in the home waters of the UK is indeed like standing in a cold shower tearing up £20 notes. Who needs that either, frankly?

Crucially, though, for a yachtsman, the place where land and sea meet when the wind is blowing onshore is a no-go area. The lea shore that is surfing heaven is the sailor’s total nightmare.

But last summer in Devon, my aversion to surfing changed. It was so wet on land in August that, having been rained on solidly in our camp site for several days, we thought we might just as well embrace our dampness and at least add the wind-protective qualities of neoprene. Courtesy of Loose-fit in Braunton (the world’s first carbon-neutral surf shop, they assure me), we invested in some state-of the-art suits and plunged into the foam at Saunton Sands, encouraged by the Loose-fit slogan: “Hang Loose in the Juice.” We were only on trashy bodyboards, purchased at the beach-side store, but it was surprisingly exhilarating. It transformed a holiday that would have otherwise been a washout.

Flush-through

As a non-scientist, what intrigues me about surfing and sailing, particularly when it comes to understanding and managing risk, is that they embrace and expand your knowledge of the non-linear. For instance, the Beaufort Scale for wind strength (which yachtsmen must learn to determine how much sail to carry, and what course to chart, and whether to go out at all) goes from 1 through to hurricane 12. But clearly a hurricane is not just twice as strong as Force 6; in fact, it’s at least three times the wind strength, and produces more than 4.5 times the wave size.

When I did a search of Art De Vany’s blog, as I’m wont to do when I want to understand something complex, it immediately threw up the insight that surfing is what de Vany describes as a “power law” activity. And that was what struck me when a large wave unexpectedly up-ended me (not for the last time), and I experienced the sensation that surfers call “flush-through” or “wash-thru”: when the ocean breaches the sea-defence that is your wet-suit’s collar and your nether regions get flooded with icy cold water, rendering you a human washing machine on a particularly vigorous rinse cycle.

Now, Ryan, at Invisible Inkling, talks a lot about the wave of change that is causing journalists and publishers to experience some of that metaphorical cullion-tightening wash-thru too. He urges journalists to re-skill, get blogging, Twittering and exploring social networks. Because newspaper circulations are falling, and revenue models that can guarantee the future of serious news-gathering are so far proving highly elusive.

Riding the wave

Putting these two things together reminded me of my own youthful Jeremiah pronouncements and specifically a now somewhat banal — but nonetheless prescient — observation I’d made in a meeting in 75 Wall Street way back in 1996, when I was London bureau chief for Knight-Ridder, and the idea of monopolising the Internets was just a twinkle in the young eyes of two 23-year-olds called Page and Brin.

I’d been summoned for meetings there with my fellow news managers to strategise the recovery of the Knight-Ridder international newswire that had spent several months passing through the uncertainty of an auction before being acquired from the Miami-based newspaper company (then still a thriving independent entity as one of the two largest publishers in the US) by venture capitalists.

I forget how many staff we lost precisely, but we were at least fully decimated. Fearful of acquisition by a competitor and enforced redundancy, so many had left seeking greater security, often with said competitors.

Private equity firm Welsh Carsen Anderson & Stowe, the firm that had bought us, had a bold strategy to overturn Reuters, Dow Jones-Telerate, and the emergent Bloomberg, and capitalize on a wave of financial market disintermediation by being the first company in the financial information industry to apply internet protocol. They acquired a bunch of information companies, ripped out their proprietary networks and technologies, and introduced standards.

WCAS already owned what it claimed was the world’s largest private intranet, contested only at that time by Hewlett Packard. After buying us, WCAS tried to buy that doyenne of early internet adopters, Compuserve, too. They had the blessing of — and not a small amount of investment from — the world’s largest banks and pension funds. At one point Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong was our official spokesman. Continue reading ‘the maverick’s story’

Lucy Kellaway misses a trick today in the Financial Times in protesting about her female acquaintances who appear to be much more successful mothers than she feels she is. She meets a “successful” fund manager with seven children and refers to a book: “How she really does it–Secrets of successful stay-at-work moms.”

In fund management it has been well recorded by academic research that luck plays a huge part and past performance is no guide to future success. Fund management rankings suffer from what is known as survivorship bias. The unlucky failures disappear flattering the cohort of survivors.

So it is with self-help books that tell us how to be successful, citing the examples of those who have succeeded, with their various methods or secrets. What we don’t know is how many people might have followed identical strategies, be they investment, or lifestyle, only to find that in different circumstances those techniques did not work.

This is particularly true in lifestyle choices. What looks smart and clever today, can very quickly turn sour. For those to whom life has never thrown a curve ball, success strategies are all very well. Long-term success may owe more to learning how to deal with failure, and also to avoid it. Avoiding hubris is probably the first lesson, and this would argue against appearing in, let alone writing a breathlessly titled self-help book.